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The Recovery of Modern Music, Part Two
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15217 |
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THE ARTS
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8 / 1989 |
2,675 Words |
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Robert R. Reilly
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Minimalism is music slowly coming out of a state of shock. At best, it can be understood as playing a rehabilitative role in the recovery of music from its nearly complete self-destruction during the past eighty years. Minimalism's primary achievement has been the reestablishment of a rhythmic and harmonic frame of reference. But although it is a symptom of musical recovery, minimalism is not the recovery itself.
Minimalism's principal practitioners were trained in the dodecaphonic orthodoxy, and at some point in their lives had to turn decisively from its tenets. This rediscovery of tonality as, in composer John Adams' words, "not just a stylistic phenomenon that came and went, but a natural acoustic phenomenon," often came as the result of a powerful experience.
Though no Minimalist, George Rochberg was the first major composer to break out from the hermetically sealed twelve-tone system. He is perhaps the most eloquent in describing what the spiritual journey this kind of "diatonic conversion," as Adams calls it, requires. In his case, it was precipitated by the death in 1964 of his twenty-year-old son, Paul: "It became crystal clear to me that I could not continue writing so-called serial music. It was finished, hollow, meaningless." He saw that atonality and serialism "made it virtually impossible to express serenity, tranquility, grace, wit, energy."
In connection with his third string quartet, Rochberg wrote a powerful manifesto:
The pursuit of art is much more than achieving technical
mastery of means or even a personal style; it is a spiritual
journey toward the transcendence of art and of the artist's
ego. In my time of turning, I have had to abandon the
notion of originality in which the personal style of the
artist and his ego are the supreme values; the pursuit of
the one-idea, uni-dimensional work and gesture which seems
to have dominated the aesthetics of art in the twentieth
century; and the received idea that it is necessary to
divorce oneself from the past.
… In these ways I am turning away from what I consider the
cultural pathology of my own time toward what can only be
called a possibility: that music can be renewed by
regaining contact with the tradition and means of the past,
to reemerge as a spiritual force with reactivated powers of
melodic thought, rhythmic pulse, and large-scale
structure. As I see it, these things are only possible
with tonality.
Minimalism shares in the recovery Rochberg calls for, most especially in the reactivation of melodic thought and rhythmic pulse, but it seems to suffer from arrested
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